But alas, if there is any opportunity to misinterpret a comment in the least obvious way possible, someone in the comments will be sure to do so.
It is the infrastructure, moving mountains to move water, paving land to move food, laying wires for electricity and communication, train lines to move fertilizer, refineries, ports, universities to study medicines, etc.
$100 per month is not going to cover any of this, but I am pretty sure you are going to want the benefits.
So, no, an individual is not paying for train lines and ports from their personal budget. Perhaps there are some people who spend 90%+ of their income on food, shelter, and electricity, but I’m fairly certain that the majority of costs are “unnecessary” consumer goods.
Healthcare alone will blow through that, and not sure where you will draw the line on necessary and unnecessary for that.
People at some point in their lives might be spending a majority of their money on unnecessary items, but eventually, it will catch up to them (and potentially be made up by government subsidies).
Again; you’re missing the bigger point entirely and fixating on specific numbers that I threw out as a quick example.
My point was to dispute this overly simplistic assertion:
>but with the nature of marketing and social pressure, almost no one is willing to make that kind of sacrifice today.
You’re trying very hard to completely miss the broader point and are instead nitpicking something that I didn’t even claim. This is entirely a waste of time.
It’s also why discussion culture has gotten so terrible on the internet, because instead of making obvious assumptions about my intent, people insist on critiquing little irrelevant pieces of it.
I would like you for one day to stop, and each thing you use, break down the supply chain that is necessary to produce each step and part of that product, and then break those products that make each step of that process and so on until all you have is raw materials. It's highly likely you'll give up even before doing that on a very very simple item. But the inner connection between the crap you do need, and the crap you don't need isn't going to look like what you think.
Then I'd like you to do some research on tribes that lived outside of modern technologies. How many of those 'individuals' think of themselves like they are their own little gods, versus how many of them deeply understand they have on the members of their tribe to keep them alive?
Welcome to the Hacker News comment section.
I've lost track of how many times I've posted three paragraphs of thoughts and ideas and maybe some nuance, only to have someone leave a drive-by reply of "Ahh, but in paragraph 2, sentence 8, you said 'all' when in reality it's 'most'. Gotcha! Your entire comment is flawed!" I do this too though once in a while, so I guess nobody's perfect.
For that matter, my current home is inside city limits. While we have municipal water, we are not connected to the city sewer system and instead rely on a septic tank.
It annoys me to no end that I’m not legally able to make major repairs to my septic system, as it’s only allowable under a grandfather clause in the city code. If, say, a utility truck ever drives into my back yard and over my septic tank, I’ll be on the hook for ~$10k to reverse the plumbing in my home, bury a sewer line to the connection at the street, and backfill the old septic tank.
“Best” of all is that in the six years I’ve owned this home, city workers have twice parked bucket trucks in my back yard without even speaking to me. One of those times resulted in my having to dig up and replace a portion of my septic system’s drain field. The city laughed at me when I asked that they pay for the damages. I could have taken them to small claims court over it, but the actual material cost wasn’t enough to justify it.
Of course there are utility easements encumbering the property, so I’m not upset about those being used. The easements are a defined area along the edges of the property, though - not carte blanche to drive all over my yard with heavy equipment. I spoke with the workers on both occasions, and they didn’t even know how to look up where the easements were.
NB: I see I went off on a tangent there, but I’m going to leave it. That sort of dispute is exactly the kind of thing that people who want to “just live” are trying to avoid. It’s one thing to voluntarily submit to rules in exchange for some benefit - it’s another to have rules imposed on you from the outside without consent, and then to have the “authorities” in the arrangement ignore the rules without consequence while simultaneously requiring you to carefully adhere to them.
Already you're bitching about "omg its so easy for other people to practically end my life by messing up the tenuous balance I have between getting fresh water and the flow of untreated shit I produce"
Yea, this is easy when there is a few people working with plentiful water resources then it all works fine. When lots of people show up, you are shitting in each others mouths and dying of cholera and begging these "authorities" to save you. Think for 5 minutes about the argument you typed out and you'll figure out why these other complex systems exist.
And while not Amish myself, I was born in the middle of Amish country and have quite a bit of experience with populations that choose to analyze technologies before they accept them into their lives, and rejecting those they do not like. But the Amish have the same issue, they live in very low density populations. As their populations increase their members tend to leave for modern lives. Trying to live in cities without modern conveniences has lots of issues.
I think the Ancapistani was providing context that this is not a universal truth. There are plenty of areas, outside of cities, where people live much more self reliant lives, and they are not third world hellscapes.
I’m definitely not saying municipal utilities are a bad thing - I’m sharing my experiences that show that they aren’t always necessary.
The comment I originally replied to said:
> Maybe people prefer having pressurized clean tap water and sewer systems due to something other than marketing and social pressure
I’ve lived in rural areas, small towns, and the “big city”. It’s not as binary a proposition as the original commenter was making it out to be. That’s all I’m trying to share.
Maybe people prefer having pressurized clean tap water and sewer systems due to something other than marketing and social pressure. I know the women in my life would definitely prefer it compared to my grandmothers who had to travel to get water from the well everyday.